Year 2 Update Wk 9
School Photographs 24th – 25th October 2016
Children were excited to get back to school after the holiday. Since the last Weekly Update, the school has introduced the House Teams system. The four houses are Kuài lè (happiness/yellow) 快乐, Duō yuán (diversity/green) 多元, Bāo róng (inclusivity/blue) 包容, Xìn xīn (confidence/red) 信心. The children are very eager to earn points for their teams, and they can do so under four categories: effort, behaviour, attitude, care. Students have login information located in their home school diary in which they can check their points and make changes to their own icon buddy.
Our personal choices can impact the environment
Lines of Inquiry
- Decomposing (function)
- How our actions affect the environment (causation)
- Personal choices that can help sustain the environment (reflection)
The classes have been doing experiments to look at the way different materials break down or decompose. 2K and 2M buried snack waste and packaging to see what happened to it. 2G designed some experiments to find out more about what mold is and why it grows.
We have also looked more at the types and causes of pollution and moving toward thinking how are choices of what we purchase, use and do might have an affect on that pollution.
Connecting to English and persuasive writing, classes looked at different types of advertising and environmental posters to look at how images and words can influence us to make better choices or buy things that we might not need.
One focus of our Maths lessons have been about using mathematics skills in practical ways to solve problems with more than one solution. For example, this week children were posed with the problem, “A picture of a farmyard has 10 legs. What animals might be in the picture? Give more than one answer.” To answer this question students have to think about what the question is asking and what information they already have. Children were encouraged to find ways that they might find solutions and keep their work organised.
In the next few weeks students will be asked to look at something they are doing now that has a negative impact on the environment and make a pledge to do something better. This typhoon day and rainy weekend will be a good time to talk about what change they could make. Pledging to not throw garbage in the ocean is not a change if they already do not throw garbage into the ocean. What could they do better?
The Year 2 classes will be visiting the Hong Kong EcoPark in November. Look for the permission slip and confirm if you would like to be a parent helper. The days are as follows: 2K on 7th, 2M on 14th, 2G on 17th of November.
